Pirate Bay creator forced to remove content from Russian sites

It’s not good to be in Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm’s position these days. Not only is he waiting to be extradited to Denmark to face hacking charges, but the Russian government is targeting his operations as well.

A Moscow court’s verdicts finds that Svartholm is the registrant for two sites: Rutor.org and Kinozal.tv. The significance? These happen to be two of the biggest pirate sites operating in Russia. This comes after Russia passed a comprehensive set of anti-piracy laws earlier this year, which can be employed to makes websites unavailable and block IP addresses as well.

A quick search of Rutor.org on whois.net, which provides domain registration information, indeed confirms that Svartholm is the registrant for Rutor. A search for Kinozal.tv, however, didn’t turn up anything conclusive one way or the other.

Copyright holders accused Rutor.org and Kinozal.tv of distributing their TV shows and movies without legal consent. The titles in question include big-name shows like Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, as well as movies Stalingrad and Legend 17.

Not only has Svartholm now been required to halt the distribution of these works through the above-named websites, but he’s also forced to pay fines as well. The amount of the fines is currently unknown. A representative for those pursuing legal action against Svartholm stated that copyright holders “do not care who the ultimate owner of the site is” as long as the above-named TV shows and movies are no longer shareable through Rutor.org and Kinozal.tv.